Urban Indigenous Groups in India - COVID Restrictions Pushing Them to Extinction

In this series of articles, Gajanan Khergamker talks about the daily life and the plight of local city tribals in metropolitan cities such as Mumbai who were already buckling under the apathy of urban attitudes, but now the COVID-related lockdowns have hit the city tribals the hardest. The author feels while the lives of urban indigenous groups are mired with controversy, they form an integral part of modern India’s present.

- Gajanan Khergamker

Among humans, it is the indigenous who lives the closest to the environment, to animals, foliage, and a topography, and closely in sync as an extension of his very existence.

Yet, over the years, the native has transformed to adapt, with undocumented deft, to urban spaces and modern living. However, in his adaptations too, he has stayed loyal to nature—his friend for life. Over the last year and a half, however, the COVID lockdown restrictions imposed across India hit him the worst, restricting his physical movement, interactions with his living on the street off The Gateway of India his ‘family’ of animals and his association with land—his home.

The native’s tryst with animals is an association that transcends generations together in sharp contrast to the modern-day ‘ownership of pets’ and selective ‘love’ for pedigrees.

It isn’t rare to find families of local city tribals living with camels, poultry, a few dogs and even ‘pet’ turtles on the loose living on a pavement in large cities such as Ahmedabad. While their lives are mired with controversy, mostly owing to the acute dearth of information and surge in damaging hearsay available, they form an integral part of modern India’s present.

Bolstered by affirmative law and policies formulated to protect them from the vagaries of urban settings and cultural bias, they existed, sturdily countering notions, noxious as ever. The indigenous groups formed their own symbiotic relations with modern communities who made peace with them but only after years of delivering the usual resistance and angst doled out to the ‘outsiders.’